Seagate, Hitachi Plan Disk-Encryption Launches

A number of disk-drive OEMs plan to embrace full-disk encryption as a security measure this coming week, according to industry sources.

A number of disk-drive OEMs plan to embrace full-disk encryption as a security measure this coming week, according to industry sources.

On Monday, Seagate, Dell, and McAfee announced a partnership. But Hitachi also plans to announce an FDE drive this week, along with a third drive maker.

FDE drives perform the same functions as software encryption, but use an on-chip cryptographic unit to encode the drive's contents. The idea is to secure the drive in case it or a notebook containing the drive is lost, preventing the drive's data from being seen by unfriendly eyes. A laptop is stolen every 52 seconds, according to a 2007 study by the FBI. Almost none are ever recovered.

At press time, a spokeswoman for Hitachi said that the company had not decided to make a formal announcement on Monday, or wait until later in the week. Seagate, meanwhile, said it had begun shipping the first 320-Gbyte and 500-Gbyte FDE 2.5-inch Momentus notebook drives, available in either in 5,400 or 7,200-RPM speeds, which are available on a range of Dell Latitude notebooks, Precision mobile workstations, and a single Optiplex desktop. They will be managed by McAfee's management console, the companies said.

It was not known whether Toshiba planned to launch a similar FDE drive, although Toshiba and Wave Systems -- known for its TPM chips inside most laptops -- teamed up in August.

Seagate launched its first 150-Gbyte FDE drives about a year and a half ago, according to Joni Clark, the product marketing manager for Personal Compute Business Unit at Seagate. In addition to a version that Seagate will ship to OEMs, the company will also make available a standalone unit so that consumers and enthusiasts will be able to upgrade the drive themselves, she said. Maxtor's BlackArmor external drive will also eventually be upgraded with the new drives, Seagate's Clark said.

Both Seagate and McAfee already use FIPS-197 government-grade algorithms in their products that have been certified by the NSA; Seagate's drive uses a dedicated chip, while McAfee's software-based endpoint encryption harnesses the power of the CPU. The difference lies in the speed of the encryption  Seagate's drives encrypt at the speed the hard drive itself runs, cutting the time to encrypt a new drive down from a potentially day-long exercise.

From McAfee's perspective, however, "the value is not the encryption mechanism, it's the management of the encryption," said Chris Parkerson, group solutions marketing manager for data protection at McAfee. 'Enterprise midmarket accounts don't have to roll this out, and then prove they did it."

The drives can either be managed via a centralized management system, or just through a BIOS platform. The latter will be priced more cheaply, the companies said.